Unexplained Leap In CO2 Levels 1215
Cally writes "The Guardian is reporting that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have leapt by 4.5 ppm in the last two years. This raises the ugly possibility that the capacity of a large carbon sink (possibly the oceans) has been exceeded, and the worst-case scenario is that a tipping point has been reached and a runaway warming scenario is in progress. Quote from Dr. Piers Foster of Reading University: 'If this is a rate change, of course it will be very significant. It will be of enormous concern, because it will imply that all our global warming predictions for the next hundred years or so will have to be redone.'"
More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
Buildup of atmospheric C02 is moderated by "sinks" on the earth's surface that use some C02 and store much of the carbon in living organisms, organic matter and carbonate minerals, says soil scientist H.H. Cheng. These carbon sinks include the oceans that cover more than 70 percent of the earth surface, forests and other vegetation covering the land, and organic matter in the soil.
Interestingly, this article talks about soil as a possible source of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, making the El Nino effect not always a good indicator of how much a rise or fall in atmospheric CO2 should be. Finally, here is article that that argues that rises in atmospheric CO2 are not a cause for alarm: PortlandTribune.com | Rise in CO2 levels is no cause for alarm [portlandtribune.com]
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
For what it's worth: The article - it's really just a brief op-ed piece - is fairly old (Fri, Jun 20, 2003), does not deal with the "leap" dealt with in the original article, and is written by the "environmental policy director at Cascade Policy Institute, a free-market think tank in Portland".
runaway warming trend? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know about everywhere else, but this is the mildest summer we have ever had in my entire life in TX. I think it broke 100 degrees 3 times all summer. Personally I'm predicting a harsh winter if it follows the same trend.
The sky is falling (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a graph of temperature vs. Carbon-dioxide levels [junkscience.com]. See a relationship? Neither do I.
It's from this article [junkscience.com].
global warming Back gorund (Score:2, Informative)
EPA : EPA Global Warming Site
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/cont ent/index.html
global warming group http://www.globalwarming.org/
Cause & effect's of global warming http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/default.asp
Re:runaway warming trend? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to bring facts into this.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The sky is falling (Score:5, Informative)
However (see this [nasa.gov] Nasa page) Earth-surface and near-surface measurements do show warming. As we live on or very near the earth's surface, this is the imporant point to notice.
The graphs you point at is somewhat selective in its choice of data.
Global Cooling? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cue standard issue global warming denier (Score:5, Informative)
Also, samples from much earlier periods are frequently a _lot_ higher than present day figures. I recall hearing about a period where scientists had trouble explaining how the CO2 levels got so high.
Its easy (Score:2, Informative)
Best Case Reaction... (Score:1, Informative)
There is very strong evidence that since the industrial revolution we have significantly increased CO2 input into the ecosystem while at the same time reducing the capacity for CO2 to be locked away as carbon in the world's forests. Now whether or not this has yet had an effect on global temperatures, or will, is still a question to be discussed, although I personally think it almost certainly has.
Someone told me once that if the size of the average car in America were the same as the size of the average car in Europe, America would remove it's entire requirement for Saudi Arabian oil. Does anyone know if that's true?
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that waving arms around about impending doom isn't massively useful and that more research is needed given the huge number of unknowns, but I really think that trading the risks (passing tipping point, really really screwing the atmos., causing huge changes, inevitable famine on such a scale never seen likely consequent wars over resources... MAYBE versus not doing anything bar more research and therefore saving money/increasing profit (primarily for the benefit of western nations)) than it seems wise to try to reduce CO2 emitions!
the junk in junkscience.com (Score:5, Informative)
He has spent his life as a lobbyist for major corporations and trade organisations which have poisioning or polluting problems. He originally ran NEPI (National Environmental Policy Institute) which was founded by Republican Rep Don Ritter (who tried to get tobacco industry funding) using oil and gas industry funding. NEPI was dedicated to transforming both the EPA and the FDA, and challenging the cost of Superfund toxic cleanups by these large corporations.
NEPI was also associated with the AQSC (Air Quality Standards Coalition) which was devoted to emasculating Clean Air laws. This organisation took up the cry of "we need sound science" from the chemical industry as a way to counter claims of pollution -- and Milloy became involved in what became known as the "sound-science" movement. Its most effective ploy was to label science not beneficial to the large funding corporations as "junk" -- and Milloy was one of its most effective lobbyists because he wrote well, and used humour (PJ O'Rourke was another -- but better!)
He joined Philip Morris's specialist-science/PR company APCO & Associates in 1992, working behind the scenes on a business venture known as "Issues Watch". By this time, APCO had been taken over and become a part of the world-wide Grey Marketing organisation, and so Milloy was able to use the international organisation as a feed source for services to corporations who had international problems.
Issues Watch bulletins were only given out to paying customers, so Milloy started for APCO the "Junkscience.com" web site, which gave him an outlet to attack health and environmental activists, and scientists who published findings not supportive of his client's businesses. Like most good PR it mixes some good, general criticism of science and science-reporting, with some outright distorted and manipulative pieces.
The Junkscience web site was supposedly run by a pseudo-grassroots organisation called TASSC (The Advancement for Sound Science Coalition), which initially paid ex-Governor Curruthers of New Mexico as a front. Milloy actually ran it from the back-room, and issued the press releases. Then when Curruthers resigned, Milloy started to call himself "Director" (Bonner Cohen - another of the same ilk also working for APCO - became "President")
Initially all of this was funded by Philip Morris, as part of their contributions to the distortion of tobacco science, but later they widened out the focus and introduced even more funding by establishing a coalition -- with energy, pharmaceutical, chemical companies. TASSC's funders include 3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lorillard Tobacco, Louisiana Chemical Association,National Pest Control Association, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris Companies, Procter & Gamble, Santa Fe Pacific Gold, and W.R. Grace, the asbestos and pesticide manufacturers.
TASSC was then exposed publicly as a fraud. And so Milloy established the "Citizens for the Integrity of Science" to take over the running of the Junkscience.com web site.
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Stev
amazing what you find on the internets
Re:The sky is falling (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The sky is falling (Score:4, Informative)
Which do you believe?
Re:runaway warming trend? (Score:5, Informative)
The typical example is that you've got a water wheel where each bucket has a hole that leaks water at a fixed rate. Now you allow water to flow into the system - the more water, the faster the wheel goes... up to a point. when the "tipping point" is reached, the system goes haywire, speeding up, slowing down, even reversing direction. Here's a little demo [mit.edu]
I'm not saying that this is what is happening here, just that "but we had a mild summer this year" is missing the point.
Global Warming May Be Natural Climate Change (Score:4, Informative)
Another thing to keep in mind is that one of the more recent ice ages was caused by arctic ice melting into the Atlantic, the resulting rush of fresh water causing the warm waters of the Gulf Stream to sink. The glaciers started to move in after only 70 years (a short time in Geological terms).
So, it's possible that this whole warmup is natural, and we're actually heading for an ice age. Freeze or Broil, take you pick, everyone.
I wouldn't worry, though, we'll all be killed in the Nuclear War soon, anyway.
Re:More on sinks (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More on sinks (Score:4, Informative)
But most of the activity indeed seems to be centered in Europe. Russia recently joined the Kyoto treaty so that it would look good on paper. China seems moderately active but they probably don't have the means to do much yet. And the US policy is to do nothing that will harm the bottom line. As usual.
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
The down side of this breadth is that when the media present a scientific issue, they, wishing to be "balanced" and not understanding the issue, will look around for some one who takes the opposite view, and find someone. So, they give equal air time to someone who represents the consensus view of 99.5% of the world's scientists who have thought about the question, and a random member of the other 0.5%. The result is that the public really has no idea what is a genuine scientific controversy with the world's experts split 50/50 and what is a few oddballs railing against an otherwise solid consensus.
Global warming is a good example of this. The media makes it seem like a closely fought evenly balanced scientific dispute, which it might have been 20 years ago, rather than an issue that the vast majority of climatologists will agree is settled in general terms (although many important questions remain), which it is today. This is exacerbated when oil companies and their hirelings (like the US federal government) spend their billions to push their viewpoint as well.
On your technical points. Firstly the "drop in the ocean" thing is just wrong. We are emitting a substantial fraction (something like 30% I think) of all the CO2 released every year. The CO2 levels and temperatures have varied historically, but (a) The consequences were pretty unpleasant (rising sea levels, etc.) and (b) many of the changes happened over millions of years, not decades.
Nuclear Bombs (Score:2, Informative)
OBQT
Speaking of politicization of science:
http://scientistsandengineersforchange.org/index.
Man's destruction will release a LOT of CO2 (Score:2, Informative)
The tundra is releasing huge amounts of methane and carbon dioxide now, from microbial processes. Plus, as the oceans warm up, increasing amounts of methane gas are released as the molecular methane bound in methane clathrate ices is freed by melting. Just to give an idea of how this is changing the atmosphere now, Summer temperatures at the North Pole were 15F warmer than normal -- just a few weeks ago.
Right now, these newly-active natural sources of GHGs (Greenhouse Gasses) may exceed the amount of industrial GHGs being produced. The process is certainly self-reinforcing, and the feedback loop is now fully established.
It's no longer a matter of turning off lights and buying hybrid cars. Global Warming will not stop until the natural mechanisms now producing it stop. We should manage the energy sources we have as best we can, but there's nothing we can do about climate any time soon.
Since the time that the Earth formed a crust, the planet has been bi-stable in terms of climate: either hot or cold, stadial or glacial. The balance has been seriously threatened about half a dozen times, AFAIK: During the early Proterozoic "Iceball Earth" episode 2.3 BYA; during the pre-Cambrian Vendian period, 900-600 MYA, 4 glacial epochs; and during the Permian extinction (251 MYA). Why the climate recovered, I don't know, but it did. But this time, if we keep pushing the atmosphere with increasing amounts of waste heat and heat-trapping GHGs, we could push it beyond its ability to recover at all. No one knows what that point is, but within a few centuries of it starting, the surface of the Earth would be too hot to support life.
We started the ball rolling, but now it's gotten beyond our control. If we survive this era, I hope our decendants learn not to do what we have done.
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
Hope this helps.
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_
which is has a graph of findings from Antarctic ice cores, whose trapped bubbles of gas nicely record CO2 levels back some 500k years. Note the big red spike at the end of the graph, way above previous highs. On a following page:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_
You can see that in the last 200 years, CO2 levels have shot up 25%.
Just because this issue gets mainstream press (read: hysteric and unreliable) coverage, doesn't make the issue go away.
la la la la la... everything is fine... (Score:4, Informative)
b) Even if it's not as bad as the leading climate scientists tell us, it's no reason to say "hey.. all is fine. let's waste energy and blow as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can."
If we don't know for sure it would be a good policy to be cautious.
Re:More on sinks (Score:4, Informative)
Lots of solid data -- temperatures, CO2 levels, etc. at:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1
Human activity produces net CO2 emission around 8 billion tons of carbon per year. While about 200 billion tons is cycled annually between plants, the atmosphere and the seas, this basically consists of two fairly balanced processes -- into and out of plants and into and out of the sea. If you look at net uptakes or releases by plants and the seas, the human contribution is huge.
Re:More on sinks (Score:2, Informative)
Global warming has much more to do than the direct heat you recieve. For example: a body of water will temper the local climate of an area, by absorbing heat during the warmer months and releasing it during the winter months. Now, you get melting arctic ice, that means the largest thermal regulation device in the world (the Oceans) is getting larger, and colder. This affects *everything*.
I live in the Chicago area, and it's been getting colder there, too, but the temperature affect we're seeing isn't from a massive cooldown, it's from the jet stream that normally swings far north into Canada coming down and sweeping across our home towns. I've heard this is more than a likely effect of global warming.
Fact of the matter is that, yes, this is most likely another swing to an extreme in the Earth's climate cycle. But the question is that "Does Man have a significant impact upon this natural cycle?" Most research points to "yes"
Re:More on sinks (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about c, but Sweden is pretty far North. If warmer seas made it wetter there (ie more snow) glaciers could easily grow. Glaciers on the Alps and in Africa are retreating.
As for (a) other theories have been pretty closely examined, and the vast majority of scientists who have examined them found that they did not account for the facts.
And then there's the DOWNWARD spiral. (Score:5, Informative)
One way to drastically drop the carbon level is to seed the southern Pacific ocean with small amounts of iron. This has been shown to cause an algae bloom, drastically increasing the sinking of CO2 from the air. (A major fraction of the algae die without being eaten and sink, taking the carbon with them to the deep ocean where it sits for millenia until the sluggish currents bring it to an upwelling.)
If we have a runaway we can try using this to turn it around. Attempting to fine-tune the carbon content of the atmosphere with it now risks the opposite spiral and a new ice age:
- Carbon sink lowers the C02 level and greenhouse effect.
- CO2 drop produces global cooling.
- Cooling results in more glaciation on Antarctica and the polar extremes of the other continents.
- Sequestered water and cooler temperatures reduce rainfall.
- Reduced rainfall expands deserts.
- Expanded deserts result in more dust in the atmosphere, including iron and other micronutrients.
- Some of this dust falls in the ocean, reenforcing and expanding the algae blooms.
There is currently some question as to whether this, rather than (just) solar cycles or continental drift modifying weather cycles, is the cause of ice ages.
Re:More on sinks (Score:3, Informative)
To boil it down a little:
Re:Me too! (Score:2, Informative)
Yep. I spent many (many) years in computing as a sysprog, but I got a bit of an awakening when I went back to school to study biotechnology, and found out (almost for the first time) what the scientific method was.
Computer Science is not science.
Given that I'm now over 40, I spent enough years working with computers to come to regard the discipline (such as it is) of computer science as being an accretion of currently trendy concepts. I'm sorry if that seems excessively cynical, but that's how I've come to feel about it.
Re:More on sinks (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody in their right mind ever proposes anything as a permanent power solution. Nor have many of your alternate sources had much in the way of EPA review. A windmill has no environmental impact--great. What happens when we have acres upon acres upon acres of them, and we're taking enough energy from them to significantly disrupt prevailing wind patterns?
Tidal harnesses? Great: what happens when we've got so many of them that we're significantly impacting aqualife? Where are the large-scale, long-term studies?
Solar? Right now, solar is about the most toxic power supply there is. They take huge energy to make, oftentimes fail to generate that much energy over their lives, and the chemicals involved in the lithography are spectacularly toxic. I don't want to see large-scale solar operations, not with our current level of solar tech.
Nuclear? Nuclear has its problems, yes. On the other hand, we know what those problems are; we know how to mitigate those risks; and we know that nuclear scales extraordinarily well. It's a good solution that's available right now, and that's a hell of a lot better than a perfect solution which won't be available/debugged for another twenty years.
Satellite temperature measurements (Score:5, Informative)
There have been attempts to reconcile the two sets of data, mostly having to do with the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the satellites. These tend to produce corrected satellite records that agree with the larger warming measured on the surface, but the jury is still out.
Re:More on sinks (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you for reminding us about the cycle of photosynthesis, which among other effects gobs up CO2 and water, and produces sugar (for the plant to eat) and dioxygen as a byproduct.
Now what do you think they do with all this sugar ?
Now please hit Google and learn about the other part of the energy cycle present in most plants and indeed in most modern living organisms, which is called "respiration" (you may have heard about it): an oxidation process using dioxygen to degrade aforementioned sugars into ATP (nearly universal form of energy storage in living cells) and BLOODY CARBON DIOXIDE !
This page [wcsscience.com] summarises the main points in an intuitive way.
At any rate, the production of oxygen by trees is simply tiny. The massive release of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably one of the most important events in the history of life, was caused by the first photosynthetisers, like cyanobacteria - bacteria that do use photosynthesis to produce sugar (and oxygen), but degrade this sugar through older, less efficient mechanisms such as fermentation. Of course they did not use respiration, because before they appeared there was no oxygen to breathe (duh !)
Besides causing havoc in the primitive fauna, the so-called "oxygen holocaust" led to the appearance of the much more efficient respiration mechanism. Which in turn allowed for the emergence of much more complex forms of life (Eukaryotes) in a Bacterial world.
Most experts agree that the average global temperature was higher in the middle-ages than it is now...
Yeah right. [uea.ac.uk]
Someone save us from the product of the US education system !
Thomas-
Specious Reasoning (Score:1, Informative)
But this famous graph of theirs is badly flawed methodologically.
They take the data from here:
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/v
Which are extrapolated atmospheric CO2 measurements from the ice core in Antarctica, and then tack on the modern CO2 measurements from the actual atmosphere in a different climate.
That they don't even mention the caveats of this dangerously speculative merging of incompatible data sets makes it clear that they are more worried about convincing you than finding the truth.
The two methodologies (trapped CO2 measurement in ice vs CO2 measurement in the atmosphere) cannot be merged like this, even discounting the vast differences in climate between Hawaii and Antarctica.
For failing to mention glaring caveats that should be obvious to them, though not necessarily the reader who bothers to actually check their source data, I have to dub this as alarmist propaganda which is informative and interesting, but not empirical.
Re:Radioactivity from coal burning (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More on sinks (Score:2, Informative)
In the US alone, there is at least 10 times as much U-238 as there is coal, and if you count the seas as a source of uranium, there is millions' years of supply.
source:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/coh
horos
Re:More on sinks (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The parent's argument was totally valid??? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More on sinks (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on what kind of solar you are talking about. Most people think of the solar cells that are found on calculators - those are toxic and usually produce less energy than it takes to make them. The other kind of solar - using mirrors to focus sunlight to heat water - is very clean, cheap, and safe, though pretty unreliable.
Re:More on sinks (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.eere.energy.gov/RE/solar_concentrati
Re:More on sinks (Score:2, Informative)
2) The diagram show important things though.
- the current temperature is not outside any bounds established by history
- increase in CO2 levels are not only/always caused by humans
- in history there has been a cycle of warm periods and ice ages